Catalog
10 Gulden
| Issuer | Wiener Stadt Banco |
|---|---|
| Year | 1806 |
| Type | Standard circulation banknote |
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| Obverse description | Vertically oriented note with a decorative letterpress-printed border running along all four edges, with the text WIENER BANCO STADT ZETTEL repeated in the side margins. A central oval cartouche at the top bears the numeral 10, below which the denomination Zehen Gulden appears in elaborate calligraphic script. The body of the note is divided into multiple oval vignettes in calligraphic style, each containing the denomination in a different language — Hungarian, Czech, Polish, and Italian — flanking the imperial Austrian arms in the centre. Four manuscript signatures appear in the lower portion of the note, above a small intaglio vignette of a building, with the denomination ZEHEN GULDEN repeated in a ruled panel at the foot. |
|---|---|
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| Reverse lettering | Zehen Gulden Tiz Forint Deset zlatých Dziesięć Ryńskich Dieci fiorini |
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| Comments |
The Wiener Stadt Banco was not a bank in the modern commercial sense — it was a municipal credit institution founded in 1706, originally tasked with managing Vienna's civic debt. By the early nineteenth century it had become the principal issuer of paper currency in the Habsburg lands, a function it performed under increasing strain as the Napoleonic Wars drained imperial finances at an alarming rate.
The 1806 series appeared just one year before Austria's catastrophic state bankruptcy of 1811, when the government's Finanzpatent reduced the face value of all outstanding Banco notes to one-fifth. A 10 Gulden note issued in 1806 would have been legally worth 2 Gulden by the following decade.